ASUS GTX 980 20th Anniversary Gold Edition

ASUS GTX 980 20th Anniversary Gold Edition Review – Paying over a grand for a graphics card based on the GeForce GTX 980 is a very, very hard sell now that the GTX 980 Ti has been released. It made perfect sense when this product was first released, as ASUS has delivered the best darned GTX 980 on the planet, with performance that left other GTX 980s eating its dust, but it’s now facing off against a more powerful GPU that sells for the same price. Can the changes ASUS has made to the GTX 980 make it competitive with the Ti version of the same GPU?

ASUS GTX 980 20th Anniversary Gold Edition

ASUS has equipped this card with 14-phase power, enabling incredible overclocking capacity. It’s also got a defroster feature for LN2 overclockers, along with a clear BIOS button in case it’s overclocked so far it won’t boot. It’s also decked out the entire card with a shiny gold colour scheme, from the twin fan cooler to the gold back plate that stiffens the PCB. The cooler uses ASUS’ DirectCU II heatpipe design, and is equipped with a 0dB fan. This means that the fans only spin up when the GPU hits a certain temperature; neither fan will move when it’s just doing 2D desktop duties.

Thanks to the changes made to the card, ASUS has increased the base clock from the default speed of 1126MHz up to 1317MHz. More importantly, the Boost speed (which is the speed used when the card is under maximum load while gaming), has increased from the default speed of 1216MHz up to 1431MHz, a very tasty 18% increase. Unfortunately that’s still not enough to catapult it past the speed of the GTX 980 Ti, which can be had for the same price. If ASUS can drop the price by a couple of hundred bucks this would be an absolute winner, but it’s since been superseded by NVIDIA’s latest and greatest.